Symbee Connect Business Intelligence

Overview

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) is a 100% AWS Serverless Business Intelligence (BI) solution that was developed for Amazon QuickSight to provide both Real-time and Historical Business Intelligence (BI) for the Contact Center.

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) supports the following AWS Services and Solutions:

  • Symbee Connect solutions
  • Amazon Connect CCP and/or desktop
  • Connect Streams API deployments from customers
  • Connect Streams API deployments from third-party developers
  • Amazon Connect Contact Lens (Sentiment Analysis)
  • Symbee Connect Optimize (Evaluations)

  • Amazon Connect Contact Attributes (CA)

    • Amazon Lex
    • Contact Flows
    • Surveys
    • Integrations
    • Third-party data

  • Amazon Connect Analytics Data Lake

  • Amazon Lex (Conversational AI)
  • Amazon SES (Email)
  • Amazon Pinpoint (SMS)
  • Amazon Chime SDK
  • Amazon Bedrock
  • Amazon CloudWatch
  • Amazon EventBridge
  • Salesforce Service and/or Sales Cloud for Amazon Connect
  • CRM solutions with Amazon Connect (i.e., MS Dynamics, ServiceNow, Zendesk, SAP, etc.)
  • Any data for other third-party solutions and data sources (i.e. Verint, WEM)

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) is designed to provide contact center data management, data reporting/analytics, data insights, and observability to any Omnichannel interaction, contact attribute’s (CA), Conversational/Generative AI, and other AI/ML AWS Services.

The solution collects, organizes, centralizes, curates and partitions all of your AWS Contact Center and Symbee Connect related data. It then compresses the data into a Parquet format described using AWS Glue, stores it into well-partitioned S3 storage for cost efficient use with Amazon Athena, and automatically adjusts data to the preferred customer time zone(s).

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) provides out-the-box managed Datasets and Dashboards (i.e. reports) that include tables, graphs and chart visualizations of your data using Amazon QuickSight.

The data can also be accessed by any third-party Business Intelligence (BI) tool that can connect via Athena, AWS Data Sources and the many publicly available Amazon QuickSight connectors.

Implementation Methodology

The implementation methodology followed for Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) was to provide a secure end-to-end deployment that is cost optimized, 100% Serverless and can be deployed within your existing AWS account and if required, an existing Amazon QuickSight deployment too, without any changes to that deployment.

Key Methodologies of Deployment

First was to develop a Business Intelligence (BI) solution that focused on keeping all customer data private, secure, encrypted, security compliant and 100% within the customers AWS Account.

Second, we focused on Cost Optimization by utilizing AWS Serverless services that are pay-as-you-go (i.e., Kinesis, S3, Athena, Glue and QuickSight), and avoid Cost Heavy continuous-use services such as VPC's, EC2's, Containers, ElastiCache, OpenSearch, RDS and/or Redshift databases.

Third, we focused on allowing the customer the option to import all AWS-based historical data from Amazon Connect and related services into Symbee Connect Business Intelligence during installation so the customer can immediately have access to standard dashboards and visualizations of historical data.

Fourth, we focused on a Business Intelligence solution that provides combined visualizations (i.e. pre-defined dashboards) of all Amazon Connect and/or Symbee Connect delivered Contact Center interactions as well as AWS services and solutions (see overview) in support of the customer contact center. This can then be extended for the customer to develop Custom Reports, using custom Contact Attributes (CA) with any dataset that includes routing profiles, queues, agents, Contact Lens, and any third-part data (internally or externally).

Finally, to achieve all of the above, we developed a single AWS CloudFormation to provide an automated deployment of all the required configuration into the customer environment, including temporary components to migrate the customer historical data (these components can undeployed once the historical migration is complete). The initial customer deployment and configuration time takes less than 60 minutes to complete. Once complete, the option for historical data migration can then be initiated and completed as required.

All Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) pre-defined dashboards for Amazon QuickSight can then be optionally selected and installed through the Symbee Connect Administration Portal. All the pre-defined dashboards provide the same level of data that Amazon Connect reporting provides out-the-box without any of the reporting limitations. Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) then increases that capability by adding in Integrated and SPICE datasets, additional key industry statistics/KPI's, graphical visualizations for each type of dashboard group (i.e. routing profiles, queues, agents, and Contact Lens)

One limitation of Amazon QuickSight is it does not provide a native way through the Amazon QuickSight console to auto-refresh dashboards (i.e. create a real-time report) at a predefined interval (i.e., have a dashboard update every 30-60 seconds).

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) using Amazon QuickSight Embedded has an embedded Real-time Dashboards feature, thus creating Real-time Business Intelligence. This innovative feature is provided within the Symbee Connect Administration Portal to allow the customer to view any Amazon QuickSight dashboard with an optional automated refresh timer as well as create a Wallboard dashboard. Access to these real-time views can then be provided to a select set of users in the Contact Center (i.e. managers, supervisors and agents).

Major Components and Data Flow

The following diagram depicts a high level view of the data flow, major components, and how they are managed:

The main Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) CloudFormation (downloadable from the Symbee Connect Administration Portal) deploys and manages all the components needed to collect and organize the data into an Athena-ready S3 bucket, including components to assist with migration of historical data, current-day live data, and components to support real-time data views. It also deploys additional Athena views to assist easier usage of the data in Amazon QuickSight, as well as the core configuration items needed in your Amazon QuickSight instance to support automated deployment of the predefined "managed" Dashboards from the Administration Portal. As updates are available, the latest version of the Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) CloudFormation can be downloaded from the portal and applied to your environment as a CloudFormation Update.

The predefined "managed" Dashboards (the out the box reports) get deployed from a screen within the Symbee Connect Administration Portal, where you can choose which dashboards you want to deploy, or deploy all of them. If any updates become available to the predefined "managed" dashboards, or as new predefined dashboards become available, the deployment screen in the portal will indicate which managed dashboards you already have deployed, which ones have a newer version available, and which ones have not yet been deployed.

Realtime dashboards can be viewed within Amazon QuickSight, however Amazon QuickSight does not have a default behavior to allow them to be automatically refreshed on an interval. The Administration Portal provides a QuickSight Real-time Dashboard viewer that supports this functionality.

Amazon QuickSight

Symbee Connect Business Intelligence uses Amazon QuickSight as the default means of visualizing your data. The predefined out-the-box reports provided by Symbee Connect Business Intelligence are referred to as Dashboards in an Amazon QuickSight context.

Amazon QuickSight is one of the many services available within your AWS Account and is initially set up and accessed through your AWS Console. Per AWS:

Amazon QuickSight is a cloud-scale business intelligence (BI) service that you can use to deliver easy-to-understand insights to the people who you work with, wherever they are. Amazon QuickSight connects to your data in the cloud and combines data from many different sources. As a fully managed cloud-based service, Amazon QuickSight provides enterprise-grade security, global availability, and built-in redundancy. It also provides the user-management tools that you need to scale from 10 users to 10,000, all with no infrastructure to deploy or manage.

For further details and to learn more, see AWS Amazon QuickSight documentation here, and here.

If you are not already making use of Amazon QuickSight, or do not have Amazon QuickSight provisioned in the AWS account where you are running your Amazon Connect and Symbee Connect resources, you will need to sign up for Amazon QuickSight before you deploy the Symbee Connect Business Intelligence (SCBI) CloudFormation stack. Refer to Pre-requisite - Sign up for Amazon QuickSight for details on this.